Modernity and Its Discontents(2)

Term:
Fall 2012

Subject Code:
GPOL

Course Number:
6127

An introduction to liberal studies at The New School for Social Research, this seminar brings new students and faculty together to explore a variety of themes and texts that epitomize some of the critical concerns of our age. Among the topics discussed are freedom and the problem of progress; human rights; individualism; the end of slavery and the implications of European world domination; new views of human nature; the idea of the avant-garde; and the moral implications of modern war and totalitarianism. Among the authors read are Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, James Madison, Robespierre, Condorcet, Hegel, Marx, Emerson, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad, Darwin, Freud, Ernst Junger, Georg Lukacs, Andre Malraux, Jean Amery, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault.